Blue Bars, Orange Bottle
The post office isn’t open yet. Gray, shabby stairs. A blue door with peeled paint. The same blue on the bars over the window – like they’re keeping the letters in.
I’m ten, waiting at the corner. A girl arrives – glossy, out of our town, like she walks off a ’00s pop video.
“When do they open?”
“In about twenty minutes,” I say, watchless.
She looks at the envelope she’s carrying, then slips it and a folded twenty into my palm. “Could you send it?”
I blink.
“Keep the change.”
The lock clicks. Inside: chalk dust, rubber bands, saints and kittens on cheap calendars. A quarter stamp. The address: a military unit, numbers like a second postcode. Not a front – just the kind where boys vanish two years to paint fences, build someone’s summer house, come back with calluses and nothing to tell. The kind where girls promise to wait. I lick the stamp – bitter gum – and smooth it to the corner. I feed the letter into the slot. The blue bars watch.
After, I walk not home but to the only supermarket in town, the place we never enter – too bright, too rich. I push the door with that twenty like it could open a border. I buy the most expensive orange juice – the kind that promises a “natural taste” – though I barely know the taste of juice. Peanuts, too. A tenth folded in a tin, like a seed put by for spring. I don’t tell anyone.
I still see her at the blue door, the letter moving from her life into mine. Somewhere a boy counts days in a unit that teaches nothing. Maybe it’s the last letter. She looks too polished to be waiting, too careless to trust a child with her goodbye. Or maybe I’m wrong – it could be her first time here, caught by a closed door she didn’t know how to read. The letter goes anyway, and he never learns his envelope passed through a ten-year-old’s hands.
What stays: paper. Ink. Orange on my tongue. The bars holding their color.
Iryna Somkina is a self-taught author based in Kyiv, Ukraine. She returned to writing after a ten-year silence. Her work explores memory, displacement, and quiet acts of rebellion. Her works appear in Gone Lawn and Livina Press.